Creating a transparent GIF

I never really messed with images until a few weeks ago. Always did coding etc. Anway, I created a gif (a few of them) and decided to make it animated. No problems - easy enough. Blue letters - transparent background. But when I noticed the anim gif on a website, the letters were sort of blurred. What is the best option to save a gif in - I mean, you have GIF. And then under that, Perceptual, selective, Web. And then you have no dither, diffusion, etc. And then you have Diffusion Transparency dither, Pattern Transparency dither, and Noise Transparency dither.

What would be the best option(s) to create a gif / anim gif? I tried all the no dither options that I could see but still it just did not come out. The text was all blurred. It is mainly all text with just one image in the lower right hand corner.

Apologies if some of this is reiterating what you already know but you ask a lot of questions in your post.

First off Palette. Photoshop and most other Apps offer a selection of palettes for GIF files. This is because your original file is most likely in millions of colours and GIF only supports 256 colours max. The different Palette presets (Perceptual, Web, etc.) basically determine how PS reduces the colours in your image to 256 (or 128, 64, 32, 16 or what ever number of colours you choose – the less colours, the smaller the files size)

Web, uses only WebSafe colours. Perceptual and Selective are two different ways of working out the nearest colours needed to match those in you image. If you are working with lots of custom colours, its best to leave this on Perceptual.

Then we have dither. Dithering is the means by which an application makes up for the lack of colours in an image. You can see the effect by creating a gradient, and saving it as a 16 colour GIF with, and without dither. The different dither settings (Diffusion, Noise, Pattern) are simply different ways of arranging the dithered pixels. I always find that Diffusion offers the best files size and results.

Now, in your specific example (although without seeing it it’s hard to diagnose) it sounds like your problem could be the Anti Aliasing on the text and / or the Matte you’ve used. These settings depend on the app you’re using so if you could let us know what that is (and maybe post the image) we’ll be in a much better position to help you out.

Thank you. Everything you had mentioned - I had done once or twice. But I did not think about the 256 colors web safe colors. I'll try that & see if that helps. I was using an off blue so maybe another color will be more beneficial.